Abstracts

Translating East and West(25.7.2012)

Abstracts

Keynote Speaker

Mona Baker (University ofManchester)

Translation, Representation, and Narrative Performance

Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another. Part of its power stems from the fact that as a genre, or type of communication, it tends to be understood as ‘merely’ reporting on something that is already available in another social space, that something being an independent source text that pre-exists the translation. Access to this ‘authentic’ source text is assumed to afford us an understanding of the culture that produced it. This narrative of translation allows many political lobbies to produce and disseminate carefully selected or ‘crafted’ translations as representative of the values and attitudes of specific regions and their peoples.

Using concrete examples of subtitled political commercials and video clips created by both political lobbies and activists, this presentation will attempt to demonstrate that far from being a documentary practice that follows and is subsidiary to an independent source text, translation is imbricated in an ongoing process of (re)constructing the world through narrative performance. Translation offers a productive and malleable space that can be used by competing parties both to configure relationships between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and, importantly, to deconstruct and contest the resulting configurations.

Mona Baker is Professor of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (Routledge, 1992; second edition 2011) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge, 2006), Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998, 2001; second edition, co-edited with Gabriela Saldanha, 2009); Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009); and Critical Readings in Translation Studies (Routledge, 2010). She is also founding Editor of The Translator (St. Jerome Publishing, 1995- ), Editorial Director of St. Jerome Publishing, and founding Vice-President of IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies – www.iatis.org).

Keynote Speaker

Neelam Srivastava (NewcastleUniversity)

South Asian Literature(s) within a Comparativist Dimension: The Role of Translation

The issues arising from the process of translation have long been at the heart of debates within the field of comparative literature. I would like to examine the influence and cross-pollination between South Asian English and bhasha writing through the prism of translation, and of the unique role it occupies in the South Asian literary landscape. My paper draws on recent discussions within an international research network entitled “Postcolonial Translation: The Case of South Asia”. Translation between bhashas, and between bhasha and English texts, rather than a body of monolingual writing, is increasingly becoming the cohesive factor in defining a “South Asian” literature. My paper argues that the future of South Asian literary studies may lie in a more central focus on the process of translation, both in its material aspects (commercial viability, support of publishing houses, readership) and in its creative aspects (the dual and at times overlapping roles of author and translator, the bilingualism that distinguishes many South Asian writers). Moreover, the specifically South Asian dimension of translation studies needs further attention and analysis. While received opinion would have it that English remains the privileged translational medium for linguistic exchanges within South Asia, in fact many so-called “regional” languages are major target languages for translations of literary texts, such as, for example Malayalam and Tamil. My paper will examine some trends in translational practices across the subcontinent (with the main focus on India) in order to look at how certain genres have migrated across languages, and the transformations and continuities that characterize this movement. In particular, I will focus on some recent autobiographies translated from bhasha into English, where the importance of the author versus translator is often inverted through the unequal power relations inhering to the two languages involved.

Neelam Srivastava is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Newcastle University (UK). Her publications include The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2011) and Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel (Routledge, 2008). She has published widely on Indian literature in English, anti-colonial cinema, and postcolonial theory. She was also the coordinator of an international research network funded by the Leverhulme Trust, “Postcolonial Translation: The Case of South Asia”.

Esterino Adami, (Università di Torino)

In other pictures: translating cultures, translating comics in Kari

This paper focuses on Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008), a complex graphic novel set in urban Mumbai that explores the labyrinthine concepts of identity and gender through the stories and reflections of the lesbian protagonist. Discussion will consider the notion of translation from a double perspective: on the hand, the idea of translation as the process of meaning-making and of cultural and intercultural expression, addressing both a local and global readership; on the other, the interlinguistic process of rendering the text accessible in another language with reference to the Italian translation by Gioia Guerzoni (Nel cuore di smog city, 2009, Metropoli d’Asia). I shall deal with the power of comics to represent and translate seminal issues (e.g. the macro-theme of identity) into imagery, as well as the textual and cognitive enrichment that the combination of verbal, graphic and pictographic elements provides, in particular to younger generations.

As the labels of East and West intermix and overlap by means of migrations and globalisation, this graphic novel oscillates between Indianness and worldliness. Amruta Patil investigates thorny themes, such as the liminality or ‘alterity’ of gender discourse in a traditional society, by exploiting the skilful use of visual English, gloomy drawings, religious echoes and intertextual references. The translation strategies enacted for rendering and coping with both linguistic and semiotic elements of the graphic novel will also be analysed in order to highlight the role of translation in intercultural communication. It is in fact thanks to the complex interplay of such a wide range of stylistic resources that the cultural dialogue between East and West is constructed and it is by appropriating a non-autochthonous genre that the western-educated author tries to understand the postmodern sense of local/global identity in texts, pictures, feelings.

Esterino Adami is a researcher in English language and translation at the Department of Humanities (formerly Oriental Studies), University of Turin. His main research areas include varieties of English (in particular South Asian Englishes), Anglophone cultures, translation studies, the semiotics of comics, literary pragmatics and stylistics. He is the author of Rushdie, Kureishi, Syal. Essays in Diaspora (2006) and has extensively written on lexical and stylistic aspects of Indian English, on postcolonial authors (in particular African, Indian, Pakistani, Maltese, Cypriot), on the theme of English language education in postcolonial contexts, as well as on English language methodology in multicultural environments.

Livia Apais a researcher in Portuguese language at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”.She has extensively published on national and international journals on cultural and post-colonial studies of the official Portuguese speaking countries.She has recently studied colonial memories in representation and the language in post-colonial context and African cinema. She is the translator of several contemporary Portuguese and African writers into Italian.

Radhouan Ben Amara(University of Cagliari)

Translation as a Love-Affair

To comprehend the activity of translation, we need to clarify the relationship between culture and language. But whatever our approach to the analysis of the translatability of a text, it is essential to realize that even under the least favourable of conditions – be it cultural and/or linguistic distance, or complexity and heterogeneity of the text – the linguistic tool, i.e. the language of man, is always potentially able to express elements belonging to another language/culture. In my talk, I will argue that translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the term: it only succeeds in promising success or reconciliation. In my dissertation, I will give due attention to language frontiers, cultural rendering, and texts transmigration, in the sense that translation is also a profanation of the dead. Arab linguists would add that translation is a real lapidation of the original text. But translation is also a labyrinth, a permanent errancy and an exile; a love-affair not only between two languages, but above all between two tongues.

Radhouan Ben Amarahas a PhD in English Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in the United States. He currently teaches English, French and Translation Theory at the University of Cagliari. He has published numerous essays and books in the general area of Comparative Literature, English and French Literatures, Translation Theory and North African Literature. Among his publications: Deconstructing King Lear (2004); The Desert in Travel Writing (2006); Language and Its Discontents: Essays on Speech, Writing, Grammar & Meaning (2008); Language & Cultural Translation (2009).

Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Elena Di Giovanni

The craft of translation in India: Sujit Mukherjee on the life and afterlife of translation

“What we don’t yet have in India is a theory or theories of translation. This may be because we have been practising translation for so many years – so many centuries, in fact – that we forgot to stop and theorise”.

Sujit Mukherjee passed away in 2003, having been an outstanding intellectual figure in India and beyond. A writer himself, but most of all a translator, Mukherjee contributed greatly to stirring the debate and reflection on translation in India. Although he quite humbly declared, on several occasions, that India never had such a thing as a theory of translation, his books and articles have traced the history of this activity and given shape to a metadiscourse on translation which is far from the abstractions of theories and full of the strength of the enlightened practitioner’s point of view.

Mukherjee’s approach to the observation of translation practices is permeated by his modesty, his brisk simplicity and, above all, his relentless positivity. In his words, translation becomes a dynamic, pervasive and constructive practice, far from the subordinate and derivative essence so often ascribed to it by Western scholars.
This paper aims to bring to the fore the non-theories of Sujit Mukerjee and illustrate them in contrast with some of the most widely accepted and frequently quoted Western theories of translation.

Through Mukherjee’s eyes and mind, we shall see translation as recovery, as craft and, above all, as the life and afterlife of original texts.And once again, as elsewhere (Bollettieri e Di Giovanni, 2009), we shall lay emphasis on the brilliantly clever approach to translation practice and research developed by scholars beyond the West.

Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli is professor Emeritus at the University of Bologna, where she taught English language and Literature for a few decades. In June 2000 she was elected President of the International James Joyce Foundation for a four year mandate. She has published extensively on James Joyce, the language of advertising, literary translation, screen translation, political language, and metaphor. Her publications include Oltre l’occidente. Traduzione e alterità culturale, co-ed with Elena Di Giovanni, Milano: Bompiani 2009); Joyce and/in Translation (2007); ).Translation Studies Revisited (co-ed. with Susan Bassnet and M. Ulrych, 1999); Anna Livia Plurabelle di James Joyce nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett e altri (1996) in collaboration with Umberto Eco; Multimedia translation: Which translation for which text?(1999), Multimedia Translation for film, television and the stage (1996).

Elena Di Giovanni is Lecturer in Translation at the University of Macerata, where she is also Director of the Language Centre. PhD in English and audiovisual translation (University of Naples Federico II), she has taught audiovisual translation theory and practice within several MA programmes both in Italy and abroad (Spain, London). She is the Director of the recently launched, international MA programme in Accessibility to Media, Arts and Culture. Her research interests include translation as intercultural communication, translation and postcolonialism, and audiovisual translation in all its forms. She also works as a professional translator for the media and publishing industries.

Giuseppe Balirano (Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”)

A multimodal translation of British culture-bound humour into Chinese "youmo”

Lin Yutang’s translation of ‘humour’ into Chinese youmo is an intentional form of cross-cultural translation. Youmo may be seen as a form of appropriation of cultural meaning between faraway cultures. As a cross-cultural translation, the term necessarilysuggests a multicultural meaning insinuating a creative transformation into the Chinese process of transculturisation. Yet, sex-related Youmo displayed in American films and TV series flourishing on Chinese screens, does not often seem to be borne across into English-Chinese audiovisual translations.

This paper, focusing on Raskin and Attardo’s Semantic Script Theory of Humor, analyzes whether sex-related humour in popular American sit-coms travels, or is completely under-translated in Chinese. A multimodal grid for the analysis of visual and linguistic youmo will draw attention to some strategies which can be useful when translating multimodal humorous texts.

Giuseppe Balirano, PhD in English for Special Purposes (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”), is a researcher in English Language and Translation. He lectures on English Linguistics in the degree course in Language Mediation and in the post-graduate course in Communication in the Mediterranean Studies. He has contributed to national and international conferences and published widely in the fields of Multimodal Critical Discourse, Humour, post-colonial English Linguistics and AVT. He has been recently nominated as judge on the ELTon committee, responsible for the international awards recognising and celebrating innovation in English language teaching.

Marta Cariello

Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse: Self-translating the Untranslatable

Etel Adnan’s L’apocalypse arabe was published in 1980 and translated into English by the author in 1989, with the title The Arab Apocalypse. The book, made up of fifty-nine poems enmeshed with the paroxysm of dislocation and violence, evokes the tumultuous period of the 1970s in Lebanon, but also conveys a strong sense of universal kinship of all subaltern subjects oppressed by violence, war, or colonial power.

The text is disseminated with drawings, often substituting words or simply set beside them in a sort of “eccess” of the written language, addressing the very limits of language in the face of violence and grief but also critiquing the linearity of the narrations of national identities and the implied violence inscribed in those very national borders that have lead to the war in Lebanon and to great part of the violence taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere in the contemporary world.

Furthermore, Adnan is a polyglot writer and artist: she has written a novel in French, poetry in French and English, and, as she herself states, she “paints in Arabic”. Her polyglossia situates her at a disjointed crossroads, where her scattered drawings function as necessary signposts to find the way towards a world spoken in the language of the post-nation. The impossibility of translating certain “signposts” and the interruptions of Adnan’s poetics point to the limits of language but, at the same time, her self-translation and the drawings themselves – symbols yet even more ambiguous – take Adnan’s textual practice to the limit between untranslatability and absolute translation: the aporia of war and death, and the global immediacy of a common geo-graphy of dislocation.

Marta Cariello, Ph.D. (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”), is a research fellow in English Literature at the Department of European and Mediterranean Studies at Seconda Università di Napoli, Italy, where she also teaches English Language for Political Science. She has published articles on postcolonial literature, cultural translation and Mediterranean studies, with a specific focus on Anglophone Arab women writers and on the literature of migration.

Mirko Casagranda(Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”)

Taming the East: English and Italian Translations of the Upanishads

The Upanishads are among the most ancient collections of Sanskrit texts to introduce some pivotal concepts of the Indian spiritual system the West labels as Hinduism. Also known as Vedanta, i.e. ‘the end of the Vedas’, the Upanishads consist in more than 200 texts written in verse and usually grouped according to their main theme. As the meaning of the word itself suggests, i.e. ‘sitting at the feet of the teacher’, these texts are teachings in which the content is conveyed in a highly metaphorical way.

The paper focuses on nine main Upanishads and aims at investigating how they have been translated into English and Italian by pointing out the linguistic and cultural differences between the target texts in the two Western languages. The starting point, thus, is the assumption that the translations consistently differ in the lexical choices related to the concepts that specifically refer to Vedic culture and that hardly have an equivalent in the Western world, which consequently leads to different hermeneutic interpretations as well.

As English is one of the varieties spoken in the Indian subcontinent and a language commonly used by the many Indian spiritual groups and schools of yoga in their everyday activities, I would like to show how the English translations are closer to the source texts, whereas the Italian ones are forced to fill some cultural gaps by means of terms belonging to the Western philosophical system and are thus adapted in a process that ultimately is a way of ‘taming’ the East.

Mirko Casagranda (PhD in Comparative Literature and Language Studies, University of Trento, Italy) holds a research grant from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. His areas of research include Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies, and Varieties of English. Along with essays on multilingualism in Canada and translation, he has published the book Traduzione e codeswitching come strategie discorsive del plurilinguismo canadese (2010).

Rossella Ciocca (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”)

Masala crime fiction in Mumbai. Translating the West in the subcontinent

As the threshold connecting the Subcontinent to the world, Mumbai has always been where ‘India met what-was-not-India’. Syncretism and partaking in different cultures have been Bombay’s hallmark from the very beginning. Its geographical position, and the contingencies and rationalities of colonial history put it at the entrance to the rest of the world. From the ‘freedom of religion and of movement’ granted by the East India company, Bombay drew the energy to flourish as a free port, open to trade and continuous human transit.

Considered at the same time ‘an outpost of the West’and ‘the most Indian of Indian cities’ it has been compared to Chicago in the 1920s and New York post 9/11. Mumbai is not only the capital of the industry of images but is itself a very source of fiction: an aestheticized metropolitan scene inspiring stories and lifestyles.Glamorous and vulgar; hospitable and violent; affluent and destitute, cosmopolitan and parochial, Mumbai, “ … is a city of multiple aliases, like gangsters and whores” (S. Mehta). As it appears both in narrative and in the documentary mappings of the city, transgression figures out as one of its most widespread subtexts: crime aesthetics thus emerges as one of the most insisted patterns to represent its hybrid, westernized nature.

This paper will try to analyze various instances of trancultural processes (F. Ortiz) by which Mumbai sets itself as a space in which East and West undergo a special and particularly intensified form of continuous bilateral transaction. Examples will be drawn from the field of the contemporary novel (S. Rushdie, V. Chandra, A. Adiga etc.), docu-fiction (S. Mehta)and film (V. Bardwaj) to support the idea of the city as the gateway of India where India meets non-India and translates the West for the subcontinent.

Rossella Ciocca is professor of English Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has extensively published on Shakespeare (Il cerchio d’oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano, 1987; La musica dei sensi. Amore e pulsione nello Shakespeare comico-romantico, 1999). Her volumes include a study on the literary representations of otherness from early modern to pre-modernist periods (I volti dell’altro. Saggio sulla diversità, 1990). Her recent research interests lie in the field of postcolonial fiction. She is particularly interested in the contemporary Indian novel in English. She has edited and contributed the monographic volume of Anglistica:Indiascapes. Images and words from globalised India(2008). She is currently translating The Taming of the Shrew for the Bompiani Edition of Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

Translation is an ambiguous term. It contains the idea of both production and product, and also hints at what happens when a text (T1) that waswritten, acted, and heard long ago moves diachronically through time to be synchronically encoded (T2) in the dramatic process of the re-writing (and at times also in the theatrical process of the staging), and eventuallyin the translating process, when T2 is encoded in a different language and results in a “new” text (T3).

In hisadaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, notably Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, and Al-Hamlet Summit, playwright and director Sulayman Al-Bassam re-reads the Shakespearian political intrigues in the intercultural perspective, rooting the characters in the contemporary Arab world. And yet, their tones, registers, lexical and structural choices, in short, their ways of putting things often play on the interaction of their double contexts. The language they use – English, but not quite - conveys a new reference frame and takes on a different “flavour” in its effort to draw the attention to the underlying fabric of a different language and culture. The same slightly foreignizing strategy should perhaps characterize the coding stage of translation in order to preserve the original cultural values and the thorough significance of the text.

We are living in a moment of transition, transformation and crisis for Translation Studies; it is a watershed moment in the study of literature and translation in which two distinct lines of thought about literature and translation are coming to the fore. The first comes from the debate in Translation Studies of the 1980s and is concerned with questions such as: the collapse of binary distinctions between the original text and the translated one, the fortune of translated texts in the receiving culture, the various definitions of cultural translation, the problematic of the terminology of translation itself. The second line comes from the debates in Literary Studies which from the 1980s have begun to use the terminology of translation metaphorically, so that cultural translation has been used as an interpretative category and a useful tool for analysing the multilingual and multiethnic texts. These two distinct lines have not only failed to converge but they have been seen as oppositional. My paper intends to try to converge these two lines of research in order to find out new synergies. These synergies, I believe should be found taking into account the recent debate in TS emerged in Asian countries. Thanks to these new voices in TS (W. Ning, M. Cheung, B. Moitra Saraf, Wakabayashi and Kotnari) I intend to analyse how the perception of the act of translation and the translator’s role are changing thanks through the ‘Eastern wave’ in TS. These new insights have demonstrated how the established Anglo American translation theories and Postcolonial critical models that have been so powerful in the last few decades seem today to be inadequate and outdated. Moreover, they have outlined the urgent task to de-Westernizing translation theories and practices.

Eleonora Federiciis Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Calabria. Her main areas of research are Translation Studies, Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies. She has published various articles on translation theories, translation and intertextuality, translation and gender and Postcolonial translation. Her most recent publication is Translating Gender, Bern, Peter Lang 2011.

Gianna Fusco (Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”)

Asymmetrical Corpora, or what Italian and English speaking archaeologists see when they look at an Islamic finding.

The access to virtually unlimited archives of texts in a number of languages granted by the internet has made the usefulness of corpora in translation practices and their theoretical fruitfulness in the age of computer assisted translation only too evident.

Translators working within any specific field are in fact mediating not between two languages, but rather between two corpora comprising the instances of specialised language they have access to. They develop in turn their own vast repertoire of words, grammar structures and discourse practices in the languages they use, which can be rightly considered highly specialized, though sometimes empirical, corpora. Such corpora, however, are far from being parallel and symmetric, even when the observation is circumscribed to one specific academic discipline characterized by a highly technical jargon, that is, an area in which the circulation of knowledge is often considered unproblematic thanks to the supposed transparency of scientific tereminology.

Using Italian and English academic corpora of Islamic Archaeology as a case study and corpus linguistics as a theoretical framework, this paper aims, on the one hand, to investigate the ways in which aymmetrical corpora help define the boundaries of knowledge within specific academic disciplines and, on the other hand, to assess the potential impact of translation practices on the redefinition of those same boundaries. In other words, asymmetrical corpora help us not only to translate and “localize” scientific knowledge, but also, and more crucially, thy help us to map the epistemological project of academic disciplines as evidenced in the corpus through which knowledge is circulated within the field.

Gianna Fusco, PH.D in Comparative Literature (University of Naples “L’Orientale”), where she is currently teaching English Language. She is the author of Uomini in secondo piano. Protagoniste femminili e deuteragonisti maschili nel romanzo del tardo Ottocento (2007) and of several essays on Henry James, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson. She has also published two co-authored books on the teaching of English in the Humanities (Bridging Gaps and Crossing Texts. A Workbook of English for Humanities Students, 2010, and Incroci Testuali. Didattica dell’inglese e culture di massa, 2010). She is currently working on a study of American TV series and their transnational circulation as a form of cultural translation, a research project which was awarded a British Academy Fellowship at the American and Canadian Studies Department of the University of Birmingham (2010) and a MIAS (Multinational Institute of American Studies) Fellowship at the New YorkUniversity (2012).

If translation is the subject to be taught, what type of translation are instructors due to teach? Should instructors teach about translation or through translation? Should western, ego-bound approaches to translation be preferred to eastern, team-oriented ones? If translation needs passion, how can passion be instilled/trained? Indeed, can translation be taught at all?

These, among others, are the issues instructors are faced with when they are assigned translation courses. They deserve all-inclusive and multi-faceted socio-cultural answers, though, they generally obtain forms of compromise between dichotomous positions fluctuating across and among: a) choices of translation techniques; b) investigations on the use-abuse-misuse of both the target text and the source text; c) selections between direct/linear/male and less-direct/female translating choices, or d) negotiations between more/less western-eastern attitudes towards translation. However, if the goal behind teaching translation is training successful translators for the future to come, a balanced vision between these dichotomous aspects needs to be purposefully planned and attained, keeping in mind that functional detours and readjustments to the initial plan might become necessary.

The present paper reports on a methodological translation-oriented approach, the Situated Team Translation (STT) approach, that was tested on fifty second-year Magistrale students of Translation for Special Purposes at UNIOR, Naples in the academic year 2011-12. The STT approach is based on the integration of traditional visions on teaching translation with more contemporary, interactive and job-oriented practices of what translation skills may require and attain. It necessitates student-centered spaces where translation tasks, learning time, and educational resources can be tailored to the students’ needs so as to offer students a protected area for translation practices. In the STT approach both western and eastern visions co-exist and cooperate thanks to a balanced integration of course materials and digital media (audio, video, webinars, teleconference). The students’ comments and the final positive grades support the validity of the STT approach.

Liliana LandolfiPhD, Associate professor of English language and linguistics, teaches at UNIOR (NA). She has led seminars, presented papers at national and international conferences, and written articles, books, and CALL programs on formal and applied linguistics. Her current interests relate to situated learning for translation applications and to the impact of NLP and affect-geared methodology in formal teaching and learning environments.

“Translator Translated”: translating stories into a Western colonial language

Franco Paris(Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”)

Literary attempts to dismantle the Dutch colonial system: the cry of Multatuli and the murmur of Couperus

Multatuli was for many years a colonial administrator in the Dutch East Indies. In 1860 he wrote a novel, Max Havelaar, in which he depicted the abuses of the Dutch colonial system. This book was discussed in Parliament and influenced European public opinion. Another important Dutch writer, Couperus, wrote De stille kracht (The Hidden Force), set in Java around 1900. The book describes the disintegration of a capable administrator, beaten by mysterious forces beyond his control and by his inability to understand the local people. The influence of Max Havelaar on Dutch colonial policy was considerable. I aim to show that also Hidden Force contributed in some way to the end of Dutch colonisation.

Franco Paris teaches Dutch Literature at the University of Napels “L’Orientale”. His main interests are modern literature and the Golden Age. His teaching and research focus on translation studies and on the cultural transfer between Dutch-speaking and Italian-speaking communities. Poetry is his favourite topic. He has translated extensively from Dutch and English into Italian, including the following authors: Ruusbroec, M.K. Gandhi, G. K. Gibran, J. Huizinga, C. Nooteboom, F. Van Eeden and Hella S. Haasse, as well as poets such as G. A. Bredero, P. Van Ostaijen and Hugo Claus. Since May 2008, he is Honorary Member of the Kantl, the Belgian Royal Academy of Arts.

Charting the East in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

My paper will look at Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers as published by Faber and Faber in 2004. The novel itself exemplifies the dialogue between East and West under a literary, cultural and linguistic perspective. My analysis will focus mainly on the latter aspect through the identification of the linguistic features that give the text its ‘Oriental feel’. Moreover, my paper will seek to highlight the strategies used by the Italian translator Delfina Vezzoli to recreate such features in her version of the novel published by Feltrinelli. I will perform a stylistic analysis of both source and target text as this may provide an opportunity to detect how the ‘Orientalising effect’ is achieved in the novel and to discuss the translator’s choices in her pursuit of equivalence.

Ilaria Rizzato is Lecturer of English Linguistics and Translation at the Degree Course in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Genoa. She has translated several books by Alberto Manguel and is the author and editor of the first Italian translation of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s courtship correspondence. Her research work focuses on Translation Studies and Stylistics.

According to Media Studies scholars, media have, in the last decade, intensified their role as a channel for the collective modulation of affects contributing to trigger and circulate feelings of anxiety, vulnerability and alarm (Massumi 2009). It is the contention of this paper that My Name is Khan’s coverage of post-9/11 ethnic conflicts and Hurricane Katrina, is an example of how the state’s mediatised and cultural contract with citizens is often secured through the investment in affect, which modulates the circulation and distribution of worry and fear, but also hope and solidarity, not in order to prevent and prescribe them but by intensifying, multiplying, and saturating the linguistic and cultural communication through which communities and identities come in and out of formation (Anderson 2012). In this light, global/local cultural production and media coverage influence the ways in which ethnic conflicts and environmental disasters are appraised and evaluated in communities of practice (Martin and White 2005). Based upon such premises, the paper will consider the role of audiovisual translation in providing social and narrative information in the context of ethnic conflicts (Baker 2006). Moreover, the analysis of the film from the point of view of affect will provide the ground for the investigation of the ways in which ethnic conflicts are interpreted and communicated in the Italian version of the film.

Katherine E. Russo, PhD University of New South Wales (Sydney), is a Lecturer/Researcher in English. Her research focuses on Post-colonial English Varieties, Translation Studies, Gender, Post-colonial and Whiteness Studies. Her publications include several articles and translations. She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). She has recently been elected on the Board of the European Association for Studies of Australia and has been nominated in the Management Committee of the Action IS1101 “Climate change and migration: knowledge, law and policy, and theory”.

Eleonora Sasso (Università di Ragusa)

D.G. Rossetti’s Intersemiotic Translation of Oriental Culture

This paper takes as its starting point Gorlée’s definition of intersemiotic translation as a "creative process which presupposes the improvised desire and free will" and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of D. G. Rossetti’s double works of art, one which sees themas intersemiotic translations of Oriental culture.

Rossetti’s poetry appears to be imbued with oriental references which are intersemiotically rendered in both texts and images. "Helen of Troy", "The Bride" and "Astarte Syriaca" are not only examples of transmutation, but also attest to Rossetti’s fascination with oriental culture. Rossetti devotes close attention to Oriental tropes of seduction at several points in his work, displaying considerable ambivalence towards them. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues -- attitudes to cultural translation, questions of poetical representation of oriental culture etc -- which they raise.

Eleonora Sasso holds a PhD in English Studies from the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). She is currently Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Catania (Ragusa). She has published articles on Victorian novelists, the Pre-Raphaelites, fin-de-siècle aestheticism, Canadian women writers, as well as on literary translation, corpus linguistics and cognitive stylistics.She has translated W. M. Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences into Italian (2006). Her monographs include William Morris tra utopia e medievalismo (2007) and How the Writings of William Morris Shaped the Literary Style of Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing and Yeats: Barthesian Re-Writings Based on the Pleasure of Distorting Repetition (2011).